That said, Beatty tried to downplay the effect of the changes on his business, making several points:

It won't be possible to know for several weeks whether and how much Associated Content has really been affected by Google's algorithm change.

Google is only one of many traffic sources for Associated Content -- now that they've been acquired by Yahoo they get tons of traffic from there, and they're really pushing into social sharing (read: Facebook).

They're working really hard to improve the quality of their articles, which should mean they will get better Google rankings anyway.